• Interactive charts and plots of weekly playcounts
• Charts for only new artists
• Information about extreme weeks

For an example see what it does with my data.

I’m pleased with how it’s turned out.

I also discovered that using a foreign key of an object returned by a Django QuerySet as a dictionary key prompts Django to look the actual data up. I had something like the following:

class WeekData(models.Model):
    artist = models.ForeignKey(Artist)
    plays = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    ..

tracking = defaultdict(int)
for week in WeekData.objects.all():
    tracking[week.artist] += week.plays


The dictionary update was taking ages. Confused, I enabled Mysql’s logging and discovered 25,000 lines of the following..

SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 22
SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 23
SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 24
SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 25

At which point I realised that using week.artist as the key here looks up the artist every time, meaning 25,000 useless database queries and a really, really slow function. Perhaps I was being too hopeful in my expectation that Django would be clever.

Changing the last line to:

tracking[week.artist_id] += week.plays

sped the function up by a factor of ten and lets me produce images like this in reasonable time:

It’s showing which artists occupy which chart positions as the weeks go by. The dark black line is for Fleet Foxes .. seems I went pretty mad for them :o

Me – 469 / Kylie – 397 = 866 combined 0_o

Her best – 122 for squirmy.

My best – 72 for (la)ziest, 64 for fainter.

And hence we are an awesome couple.

In other news, Felix Laband’s music is genius.

In other words, I’ve completely redesigned the site and am quite happy with the current outcome. It’s an extension of this Sandbox theme. Really quite elegant, in appearance and (for the happy nerd inside me) in design and execution. And while it’s Easter there’ll be plenty more time to extend.

Hurrah.

PS. Stumbled across this. Catch it while it lasts.

Saw ‘Trail of Dead at (the?) Oran Mor in Glasgow last night, the songs I knew, aka those on Source Tags & Codes, were almost spiritual, most of the others were rocking, a couple were plain and went on too long. Forget Cassettes supported, early PJ Harvey-esque in style with some very catchy hooks and great drops. .. They started their set with a repetitive, low dirge, gradually building in tension and climaxing in noise when the singer opened her mouth and .. woah .. the sound she made was horrible. And then she stopped shouting loud and the acoustics of the place started working or something, it sounded a lot better.

The same went for ‘Trail of Dead, it almost spoilt a few of the songs.

But anyway, on with the Maths that follows my life :/

Man: Someone has stolen the ball in my mouse.
Me: Have another ball.
Man: Thank you.

A few minutes later -

Man: I can’t work out how to get the ball in this damn thing.
Me: That’s an optical mouse.
Man: Oh.
Me: arghpsjhg.ksjdgnlishgv.knxz;lkgbnzx;kgvbnzxlkfg